Rainbow Stripes
by Cygna-hime
Summary: [AUs]Worlds branch off from each other like stripes in the rainbow. Here, some of the stripes come together again.
1. Introduction

Rainbow Stripes  
  
An AU archive  
  
"There are millions of worlds, you know. The big differences get made at the big events in history, where a battle is either won or lost. Both things can't happen in one world, so a new one splits off and goes different after that. But there are all sorts of smaller things that can go two ways as well, which don't make a world split off. You've probably all had those kinds of dreams that are like your usual life, except that a lot of things are not the same, and you seem to know the future in them. Well, this is because these other worlds where two things can happen spread out from our own world like rainbows, and sort of flow into one another..."  
_-Witch Week, Diana Wynne Jones_  
  
In the end of the real story, there will be two worlds, separate and distinct. In one, the world belongs to humanity forever, to do with as they will. To destroy, or to preserve. In the other...it does not. Either may happen, but both cannot, and so there must be two worlds to hold them. Those are the great worlds.  
  
But the future could have been many more ways than those. Not very different, not enough for a new world, just enough to become one stripe in one of those two rainbows.  
  
This is the story of those futures.  
  
**General Disclaimer:**

I am not CLAMP. These characters are (for the most part) not mine. However, I doubt they mind my borrowing them to play with. Seriously.  
  
**Assorted Warnings:**

Yes, these stories are all AU. This means they are not going to happen in canon. I know this. Thank you for knowing this too.  
These stories do not, by any means, take place in the same universe as each other. These are all one-shots until further notice.  
Stories will contain shounen-ai, het and shoujo-ai, probably not all in the same story. If any of this bothers you, CLAMP is not the fandom for you.  
Please do not review this prologue, as it will be being replaced to update it for every chapter I add. Thank you.  
  
The rainbow stripe worlds are waiting for you. Would you like to..._enter_?  
  
Red: _Shizue_. There could have been a child...She would have been a hero.

Orange: _Deep Sleep Dreaming_. Sometimes peace is most important, even when the world is at stake.


	2. Red: Shizue

Rainbow Stripes

Red: Shizue

            There could have been a child.

            She would have been born in autumn (not in spring, not when cherry trees were in bloom), and they would have smiled and pretended not to be relieved that it was a girl, not a boy. Not a boy who would have had to be heir to one or both houses; they would never have wished that on anyone. Hokuto would have agreed to carry the child, their child, and she would have winked and whispered that she knew it would be a girl. She would have been insufferable for weeks after being proven right, but it wouldn't have mattered. Nothing else would have mattered but their daughter.

            They would have named her Shizue, and then argued for months over which last name she would have. Finally, Hokuto would have grown tired of trying not to laugh at them, and declared that they were going to run the two names together, if that would make them stop arguing and waking the baby. So she would have been named Shizue Sakuragi; both of theirs, forever and ever.

            She would have grown into a quiet child, always watching and listening to others. Some days, she would have reveled in the attention of doting parents and a still more doting aunt, who would have visited so often someone (probably she herself) would have joked that she might as well move in with them. She wouldn't have been on visiting terms with any of her other family. Hokuto would have supported her brother's choice, and would still be Not Speaking to those who had not, even when that selfsame brother timidly suggested a reconciliation.

            "Not on your life!", She would have said. "Those relatives of ours won't admit you haven't made a mistake, and they won't have you back until you do. So don't you _dare_ apologize to them, you hear me?" He would have sighed and agreed. After all, he would have had all the family he wanted. And Shizue would have listened. She would have agreed with her aunt; no good apologizing (and it would have had to be an apology) when you weren't in the least sorry for what you'd done.

            Shizue wouldn't have been sorry for things often. She would have had an unusual outlook on life, created from conversations she overheard at home. If asked, she would have said she wasn't sorry because she'd done what she's meant to do. That would have been the explanation she would have given when the school sent her home for hurting another student. Further questioning would have elicited the fact that the student in question had been throwing rocks at a baby bird, and all she had done was make one rock hit him instead. She would have refused to apologize to him.

            "I won't say I'm sorry," she would have said, "because I'm not. He was hurting things and he deserved to be hurt back."

            After that, she would have begun learning magic from one or another of them, picking up little spells and ways of looking here and there. Shizue would have been proud of her mixed heritage, seeing it as a gift rather than her parents' curse. But she would not have seriously understood what it could mean for a long time.

            It would have happened when she was not quite twelve. There would have been an abandoned lot that had been empty for so long that strong young trees grew amid the surrounding buildings. She would have loved to play there, climbing trees and holding long conversations with flowers and shrubs. There would have been foxgloves there, her favorite flower (medicine and poison all in one, she knew), and she would have talked with them on lazy afternoons.

            And then one day she would have found the trees cut down and bulldozers plowing the flowers under, while the workers shouted at her to leave.

            She would have run home in tears and been taught that she could, if she wanted to, make the construction stop. The ways she would have learned would have been unusual ways, walking a fine path between absolute justice and too much mercy, but they would have worked. After a few injuries and not more than two deaths, the workers would have given up. A rumor would have gone around of the place being cursed, but as Shizue would have said, rumor didn't matter to the trees. She would have learned.

            That would have been the way she was. She would not have been an ordinary person; who could be, with such extraordinary families? But she would have been her parents' daughter; willing to defy the world and believing absolutely that she could. She would have been a quiet sort of hero, no champion of humanity, but a hero to the trees. She would have been her own person; Shizue Sakuragi.

            There could have been a child. And, somewhere else, there was…But not here. Not here.

Ending: Red

_Notes: This is only semi-AU, as it's conditional rather than factual, but it describes an alternate universe. It was written for the 'Destiny's Children' challenge on the Livejournal community Togakushishrine. Please no laughing at her name, OK? It seemed like a good idea at the time. And, really, what else would you call her without having your mouth die of too many syllables? I can have a thing for not naming characters, but if you can't guess who they are…you're worse than I am._

_I think the ending seems a trifle forced ,because it was, but I couldn't think of a better way. What do you think?_


	3. Orange: Deep Sleep Dreaming

Rainbow Stripes

Orange: Deep Sleep Dreaming

He was alone, a child lost in a nightmare realm of his own devising. The walls he had built were closing in around him, a cage for that wildest of wild beasts, humanity. Slow and steady, the bars reverberated with his heartbeat;_ lub-dub, lub-dub_. Through them he could glimpse a tableau, frozen before his eyes and yet alive. A boy, a girl, and the world, turquoise globe suspended in midair so that it might be falling or rising. The boy was smiling, not at the girl who hung in the air, hand on his shoulder, but at him. The gaze would catch him, if he let it, and he would drown before he remembered to breathe. He could not meet those eyes on any terms but his own, and he did not know what those terms might be. The girl looked at him also, smiling kindly but at the same time beseeching him with her eyes and the white hand outstretched toward him. She was asking him to come help them, her and the boy and the world. He wanted to call to her, explain that he couldn't pass through the bars, tell her to find someone else, rather than he who could not be what she wanted. He did call, but still the girl's eyes begged him to come out from his cage and save them all. She begged, and the boy stared, and the world hung in the balance, all waiting for him. But he could not leave the cage where the bars beat like his heart.

He sat on a couch made of rainbows and watched the world go past through a window of cloud. Below him he saw all the years of the earth, one at a time and together. Heat and cold and rain cycled past, from bare rock to boiling sea to sphere of ice, until at last land and sea and sky met and merged in peace. Then the plants came; giant ones like nothing he had imagined, tiny ones that no eye could ever catch, all the plants he never knew. Slowly, slowly animals began, simple things and swirling shapes and tiny shells of perfect crystal, things that grew and grew and grew until they were great and terrible beyond belief, until they ruled the world with teeth like lightning and claws like thunder. Then they too were gone, and in their place came the soft animals, those who had been just that much smarter or quieter or quicker. The soft ones grew, but not as much, and they spread until he could see them everywhere. And then he saw the people. He saw two dark figures bending over a flame, and two more holding knives that had their beginnings beneath the first sea. He saw careful men painting on stone, and a woman with a drooping face pulling clay figures from her fire. He saw blood on the snow, and a yellow sun rising, and the dreams in the heads of the people, dreams of what they believed they had done. He saw death come on silent wings to those who died without warning, and rats scurrying beneath a long-desolate altar. He saw blood pouring into the ground everywhere, until the people who ran over it neither knew nor cared. He saw beauty grow up from the red-stained ground, stories and pictures and perfection, but he saw also that it was still red. He could see as the world began spinning faster and faster, until it must either cease or fling itself to pieces. Another moment, and it would do one or the other--it vanished. He knew that he should make it continue, that so much as lifting his hand would do it, but he couldn't move, couldn't bear to see the ending even as he begged for it. Then he was falling, falling, down through clouds that shaped themselves for a moment into faces no longer remembered, falling into oblivion.

He was back in the cage, staring at the frozen figures. He tried to turn his head from them, but when he did so fire licked at his vision, forcing him to face what he would rather forget. The girl was halfway off the ground, crystal wings forever frozen in the act of beating. The boy--_her brother_, he suddenly recalled and knew not how--waited for him to do something, anything, but his icicle face could not move to say what it was. _Kotori_, his mind whispered, _Fuuma_, but though the names dripped from his tongue like water they meant nothing. Only the statues meant something; pain and longing and a need that he could not understand. The fire, too--_Mother_, it fell from his lips, but his mind knew only that the fire held loss within its flames. At the same time, it beckoned him to it as the statues did, wanting something of him that he ought to give but could not, because the beating of his heart confined him. The fire, though, promised rest as the statues could not. He wanted that rest, wanted it so much more than he could imagine anyone wanting anything._ Kotori and Fuuma_, he tried to tell himself, _help them_, but the words meant nothing and the fire called. Slowly he turned to see the fire burning bright within his cage, within his reach. The first flames tickled as they touched him, then burned, but it was an ease and a pleasure to burn, far easier than turning away. He fell into the fire away from everything, away from pain and longing and crippling terror, into peace and an ending, for better or worse. As he fell, he heard the statues crumble to dust behind him and briefly regretted not letting them rest too. But everything was vanishing into the comfort of the flame.

And back in the world, Shirou Kamui stopped breathing.

Ending: Orange

_Notes: This is a quite definite AU of Requiem, a 'what if Kamui died before Subaru could pull him out of himself?' story. It was written for the 'Silence' challenge on Togakushi shrine, my own challenge. It is, I confess, an exercise in metaphor, and mainly imagery and allegory, but I liked writing it. What do you think? More plot? Stay like this?_

_This story lives! I know, I know, it's been a while, but X has been coming out in drabbles lately. C'est la vie. I have no idea when it will be updated again; challenge pending, whenever I get a really good idea._

_So, feedback? Suggestions? Words of wit or wisdom?_


End file.
